Over the years the trading card industry has developed as both a novelty item and a collectors item. As time goes by, the value of many of these trading cards which have printed indicia thereon has increased so that the trading card industry has grown significantly over the years and many trading cards have substantially increased in value. As technology has changed, however, various types of trading cards and methods of storing and communicating data have been developed.
The concept of associating card devices which store and communicate information to a user with indicia or an image thereon has been known for many years. Examples of such devices can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 3,691,312 by Petersen titled "Tape Recording Apparatus And System Having A Very Thin Cassette," U.S. Pat. No. 4,904,853 by Yokokawa titled "Dual-Function Information-Carrying Sheet Device," U.S. Pat. No. 5,411,259 by Pearson et al. titled "Video Sports Game System Using Trading Cards," and U.S. Pat. No. 5,433,035 by Bauer titled "Talking Entertainment Card." These prior card devices, however, either used older methods of storing and communicating information such as cassettes or used integrated circuit technology. Accordingly, these prior methods can be expensive and complex to manufacture even in large volumes and neither understood nor appreciated the benefits, capabilities, design, or construction of optical digital data storage devices, and more particularly optical compact discs. Only recently has the technology and concepts related to the use of optical digital data storage devices really increased and been accepted in the market so that the relative price of optical digital data storage media has decreased dramatically.
Conventional compact discs, for example, are conventionally fabricated in either 80 millimeter ("mm") or 120 mm sizes and are formed of generally rigid plastic discs. As understood by those skilled in the art, the discs are often formed by the use of a mold-based replication system using injection molding techniques. Each compact disc includes a series of either circular or spiral data tracks which are illuminated and read by a source of coherent light such as a laser. In producing these compact discs, data is optically mastered from data files and positive copies of the data are made. Die stampers are produced from electroplated shims, and discs are molded from the negative images on the die stampers. The discs are then individually metalized, and a lacquer coating is applied to each disc. The layer of rigid plastic positioned between each data track and the source of coherent light provides structural rigidity, protects the data tracks, and also functions as a single integral lens element to refract and focus the coherent light beam onto a selected data track. A disc label is also printed, and the disc inserted into a clam shell or other package for shipment to customers.
Recently, however, other thin film digital data storage medium and methods of manufacturing digital data storage media have been developed including for use with trading cards. An example of this thin film digital data storage medium and related methods can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 5,579,296 by Smith et al. titled "Optically Readable Thin Film Digital Data Storage Medium." These recently developed trading cards, however, require extensive and new manufacturing investments, require a special adaptor to make the trading cards compatible with compact disc playing systems, and can be inhibited by marketing and manufacturing constraints, including the additional special adaptor, which can make this recently developed technology less commercially feasible.